Robert Winston: ‘Striking doctors have lost the plot and the trust of the nation'

Telegraph

3 days ago

Robert Winston's impeccable bedside manner does not lend itself to expressions of anger, but there is no mistaking his disgust as he decries the 'highly immoral' doctors' strike beginning on Friday.
After six decades in medicine, Prof Lord Winston is better qualified than almost anyone in the country to assess the current state of the NHS and the impact the strike will have on it and its patients.
There is no doubt in his mind that people will die as a result of the five-day walkout – for which he cannot forgive his colleagues – but he foresees a much longer-term malaise taking root in the NHS because of the industrial action.
'I think it's very, very obvious that my colleagues, the resident doctors, have lost the plot, and more importantly probably lost the trust of the nation,' he says, 'and I think it's going to be very difficult to get that back.'
A professor of science and society at Imperial College London, Lord Winston is a fertility expert who pioneered key advancements in IVF treatment. However, it was the groundbreaking BBC documentary series he presented – including Your Life in Their Hands, The Human Body and Child of Our Time – that made him a household name. He is also a Labour peer.
Celebrated for his calm, authoritative persona, which remains steady even during a clinical dissection of his younger colleagues' behaviour, his message becomes all the more powerful.
Earlier this month, he resigned his membership of the British Medical Association (BMA) after 61 years, mainly due to his disgust at the proposed strikes, but also because of its failure to tackle rising anti-Semitism among NHS doctors, of which more follows.
The strike is an attempt by the BMA to force the Government into giving residents (previously known as junior doctors) a pay rise of 29 per cent, on top of increases of 22 per cent and 5.4 per cent over the past three years.
Lord Winston does not mince his words when I ask him how much danger patients will be in because of the strike.
'It's very likely if this lasts at all long, somebody will die,' he says. 'Inevitably they will. You can't avoid it.
'Several people clearly are going to have much worse chances of getting their cancers treated, and some people will be less well or in pain. You can't simply allow disruption of services on this scale, and not accept the fact that more accidents will happen.'
Trust in the NHS will be eroded, and Lord Winston believes that trust is not only important in determining the level of public support for the strikes but also has a direct effect on patients' health.
'That is an important part of treatment because if people trust you and they feel they're getting good medicine, they tend to get better because of what we call a placebo effect, which actually is not insignificant,' he says.
'It's been shown again and again that that attitude to your medicine plays a major role in how you heal. If you're reasonably happy and reasonably sure of your treatment, what studies have shown is that your symptoms get less and your treatment tends to be quicker.'
The doctors' union, Lord Winston says, 'does not represent a very large proportion of the medical profession' anymore, and is 'acting highly politically' under the chairmanship of Dr Thomas Dolphin, a militant Corbynista who tried, and failed, to be selected as a Labour Party candidate at the last election.
Lord Winston is not convinced that the strikes have as much support among resident doctors as it might seem; he believes many have been 'pressurised' into backing strike action by a union attempting to 'blackmail' the Government.
'At this time when people are struggling in all walks of life, in all professions, particularly with the difficult financial situations we have, I think that's pretty dishonourable. But more importantly, I don't think doctors should strike.'
Lord Winston is now 85 but still has a full head of dark hair and a jet-black moustache, and retains all the sharpness and vigour of a man half his age. 'It's probably all genes,' he chuckles when I ask how he stays looking so young. 'I don't live particularly well. I drink too much alcohol.'
He is speaking from the kitchen of his home in north-west London, where he lives alone following the sudden death of his wife Lira four years ago, after 48 years of marriage.
Lord Winston obtained his medical degree in 1964 and made a career as an expert in fertility. As professor of fertility studies at Hammersmith, he led the IVF team that pioneered pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to identify defects in human embryos. He remains professor of science and society at Imperial College London and its emeritus professor of fertility studies, and is a founding member of the UK-Israel Science Council.
He is old enough to remember the formation of the NHS, has worked within it for most of its history, and is not afraid to say that it needs to change to survive.
He points out that when the NHS was founded in 1948, the per-patient cost each year was around 10s 6d, which translates to about £100 in 2025, adjusted for inflation. Today's per-patient cost is around £3,000, meaning it is time to discuss a new way of funding the NHS, Lord Winston says.
He does not offer a ready-made alternative funding model, but says that if the NHS were a factory producing goods, the manager would know the cost price of everything it did, whereas 'we don't know any of that in the NHS'.
The biggest cost within the NHS, of course, is wages, and student doctors entering the profession today need to be realistic about what to expect, both in terms of pay and conditions when they first begin working, he suggests.
'When I talk to medical students, which I do very frequently, I make it very clear that the NHS is not an easy place to work in,' he says. 'When I first got on the wards, I made a terrible mistake on the first day – almost killed a patient by injecting something.
'I say, look, this is difficult, but in the long term it's still worth doing.'
Successive governments are partly to blame for the current dissatisfaction among some NHS staff, he says, but from a financial point of view, medicine remains a lucrative profession for doctors who rise through the ranks.
'I didn't get my first house until 10 years after I qualified. It is a problem, but in the long term it's a pretty secure job and you can do a lot of things with it. And you can earn in all sorts of ways if you want to.'
Despite being a Labour peer with expertise in health, he says he has never met Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, but believes 'he is absolutely right to be looking at all sorts of options' to end the doctors' dispute.
Streeting thinks there is a deal to be done on the cost of exams, equipment and training.
Lord Winston says he does not understand why the doctors refuse to consider the offers being made, unless the BMA is purely motivated by a desire to challenge the Government – 'and I think that's a dangerous thing to do.'
Another way in which the BMA appears to have become politicised, he says, is over the issue of anti-Semitism in the workplace.
Lord Winston, who was brought up as an Orthodox Jew, says this was part of the reason he quit the BMA.
Some Jewish doctors have reported feeling 'intimidated and unsafe' at the BMA's annual conference because one in 10 motions relate to Israel, Palestine or Zionism. The union has also been accused of allowing members to cross the line from expressing political opinions into singling out Jewish colleagues.
Is that fair criticism?
'I've had a number of letters from colleagues who have raised that issue with me,' he says. 'There are lots of areas where the BMA is failing. Anti-Semitism certainly is something that I know a lot of Jews have been worried about, and sometimes I've seen pretty horrific things that are still going on and not properly dealt with.'
He says one of the problems he keeps hearing complaints about is NHS workers conflating being Jewish with being Israeli, meaning 'you're responsible for the Israeli government and the appalling things which are happening in the Middle East'.
'I've seen many people who've been very unpleasantly criticised for something which is no fault of theirs simply because they're Jewish.'
He has come to the conclusion that the BMA, which has not even bothered responding to his attempts to engage with it, is 'not fit for purpose'.
Last year, Dr Dolphin put forward a motion, passed without debate, to reject the independent Cass review into children's transgender services, which called on the NHS to stop prescribing puberty blockers to minors.
Lord Winston, who believes people cannot change their biological sex through surgery or any other means, was an outspoken supporter of the gender-critical academic Kathleen Stock, who was sacked by the University of Sussex in 2021.
'The BMA haven't done very well on that either,' Lord Winston says. 'They've ended up with a very muddled appraisal of transgender, which doesn't make any kind of scientific sense. And of course, transgender is a massive problem because people who are transgender are now really quite at risk.
'How we deal with this, of course, has to be a scientific solution to some extent until we understand why people want to be transgender or end up being transgender […] I know from my own clinic I saw quite a few patients who had changed their sex, or had transgender procedures, who then regretted what had happened later on.
'One of the things we do need to have is real sensitivity towards people who are in this situation, and towards the families too, who often have difficult relationships with their own children as a consequence. That needs to be dealt with. I don't think the BMA has made a great attempt at doing that.
'It would be very helpful if we had a proper discussion which is based more on the science and the medicine than the attitudes.'
Another emotive subject facing politicians at the moment is assisted dying. Kim Leadbeater MP's bill to legalise it is currently on its way through the House of Lords, and Lord Winston will be speaking when it is debated later this year. He says that, having initially been against the bill, he is now leaning towards supporting it.
'I'm massively coming around to the fact that we're behind the curve in this country because […] there are many, many countries now that have some form of legislation.
'And it seems to me that there are certain situations where people really have a right to take some kind of elixir that, in fact, allows them to be finally free of pain.
'Of course, I want to see more palliative care, but one of the problems is that many of those most opposed have strong religious views. That's a dangerous position to take if you're a parliamentarian, because you're legislating for the whole community, not just people of your own faith.'
For that reason, he abstained from the last vote on the bill in the Lords, but says he has tried to imagine what he would want if he were in the position of terminally ill patients seeking control over their own death.
He draws on personal experience, recalling his time working for a GP to earn extra money during holidays from his hospital residency. The GP told him that a terminally ill lung cancer patient must not be admitted to hospital under any circumstances 'because he wants to stay in his own surroundings'. Lord Winston was told to visit the man every day, and in the end 'he died very peacefully' in his own home.
He also brings up the case of Herbie Mowes, the German antiques dealer who made history by allowing the BBC to film his death from cancer for Lord Winston's documentary series The Human Body in 1998.
The BBC, he recalls, 'wanted to abandon the programme' after the press derided it as a 'snuff video,' but after it was broadcast, it helped to change attitudes towards death, he says.
Herbie 'was content with his garden, his little house, and his friends,' and his GP visited twice a week to adjust his medication. A large crew worked on the documentary, he says, and 'I think they often changed their view about dying afterwards'.
It would be remiss not to ask the country's foremost expert on fertility for his views on the latest developments in IVF and genetics.
When I ask him for his views on this month's controversy over 'three-parent babies'– in which the nucleus of a fertilised egg is transferred into a donor egg to avoid a type of genetic disease – he points out that he fought for the procedure to be legalised during a Lords debate a decade ago.
He dismisses criticism of the procedure, which has been pioneered by Newcastle University, saying that it is only really the 'battery pack' in human cells that is being altered. But it does raise a much wider question: would it be right for science to eradicate disability altogether if it were possible?
'No,' he says, 'but we couldn't, because when it comes to genetic disease, many genetic diseases occur between generations.
'So we're going to continue to get genetic disease, even with screening, even with the ability to change DNA in embryos.'
The future of medicine, he says, 'is not really in our genes, it's in how we improve people's environment'. Better education and higher living standards, he believes, will have a greater impact on world health than the DNA inside embryos.
As for his own living standards, he mentions that he could have chosen to settle in America, where he was paid 'a huge salary' with much better funding for his research during a spell there in the early 1980s, but he cannot live without London's art galleries and its classical music and opera scene.
His other passion in life, aside from his three grown-up children and eight grandchildren, is his wine collection, which he started building up as an undergraduate, with a particular love of burgundies – 'unpredictable and often unrepeatable,' in his words.
'I recently drank one from 1919,' he says, 'which I bought for a couple of quid a long time ago and which would now be valuable at auction.
'But I'm not interested in trying to sell wine. What I like is to sit around and drink it with friends.'
Likewise, Winston's medical career has never been about the money – and he seems to wish that today's resident doctors would adopt the broader view that has guided him throughout his career.
He believes that 'doctors have a huge moral obligation'.
'They're sitting in front of somebody they don't know very well,' he says, 'but who is actually opening themselves up in a very private way, in a way they don't really want to.
'They're often in pain. They're often very worried. They often think they have something much worse than they really do. They're about to undergo all sorts of humiliating tests and investigations. They're in hospital, away from their family. They're worried about money, they're worried about their family.
'A doctor has a unique privilege. Nobody else in the world has that privilege. And I want to say that to them because, if you abuse that privilege, you run great risks with the relationship you then have with the patient afterwards.'